Building authority continues to be critical in search engine results, regardless of the fall of Google’s semantic authorship markup. Optimizing your meta data, headlines and being on top of trending keywords helps your news content rank. No question about that. But quality content conveying expertise, authority and trust plays a key role in gaining positive organic search results.

“Authoritative authors tend to do better in search because their content generates the kind of responses that lead to actual, present-day search signals,” says Mark Traphagen, senior director at Stone Temple Consulting and a Google+ expert.

Whether or not search engines continue to evolve and incorporate author credibility as a ranking factor, authority and influencer tools enable brand publishers to have even more control over the quality and credibility of their content.

Your goal as a marketing or public relations professional is no longer to have SEO-heavy content on your brand’s newsroom, website or blog. Today’s goal is more about increasing the amount of powerful and magnetic content on your site while following optimization best practices and finding the right authors to create that content.

Authorship: modern-day public relations

However, the archaic rules of yesterday that resulted in drab titles, flat copy and trite themes no longer apply. What’s current, what’s now and what can move the needle on your public relations news and marketing content clout in a positive direction is subject matter authority — both the technical and human aspects of it.

At the core of any public relations framework should be the creation of newsworthy, relevant content that’s leveraged on every level to reach the right audience, and subject matter experts, authority and influence should be part of that equation. Once you have authorship integrated into your brand’s publishing strategy, the next step is to find influential writers to contribute to your branded content who understand and have authorship established on their ends.

Sourcing the right authors to write

The goal of most brand publishers is to have journalist-quality authors (in-house and external) who are subject matter experts in your industry. Your team of writers must lead visitors through a path to conversion through their compelling, unique content.

Finding contributors with content authority is invaluable for your brand. But, the question remains: How do you vet the authors?

Through leveraging trusty influencer tools like Klout (social-based), BuzzSumo, Inkybee (blog-based), or sourcing authors the old-fashioned way at industry events, you can certainly find the right voices for your brand’s content.

The social tie-in

Influential content creators often boast a strong social follower base and have a tribe of evangelists. When influencers share content, it resonates with more people and in more relevant circles, and that tribe of followers is more apt to promote the author’s content. This in turn turns more heads toward your content and brand.

The search tie-in

The content that authoritative authors produce is more relevant, timely and intelligent — key components of content that appears high in Google search results.

“Even without Google Authorship or any actual Author Rank as search factors, authoritative authors tend to do better in search because their content generates the kind of responses that lead to actual, present-day search signals “Even without Google Authorship or any actual Author Rank as search factors, authoritative authors tend to do better in search because their content generates the kind of responses that lead to actual, present-day search signals. For example, an article by a trusted author is going to be more widely shared on social media. That leads to more visibility and exposure to new eyeballs. Inevitably some of those eyeballs will belong to other content producers who will link to the authority’s content, and those links produce real search traffic,” Traphagen reported in a recent interview.

In light of the retraction of Authorship announcement, Google says that the dropping of Authorship won’t impact other efforts to explore how authors are identified and rewarded within their search algorithm.

“Google may have (or is certainly developing) other ways to determine who it believes to be the author of a story,” notes Traphagen. “This includes comparing the byline to semantic and linguistic cues in the content. For example, If an article says it’s by Chris Brogan, and the writing style, vocabulary, subject matter, type of site it appears on and sources of links to it, all match well with other pieces written by Chris, Google may decide they have high confidence the content is written by Chris Brogan.”

Bylines may be a key signal to Author Rank moving forward. More importantly, content quality will be the biggest contributor of search strength. While Google will continue to tweak their search algorithms, the goal of marketing and public relations content creators should focus on carving out a niche and authoring outstanding content.

The bottom line: Subject matter expert content creators will have the best real estate on Google, leading to better brand awareness, website traffic and conversions.

Of course you want customers to spend time on your site but when researching the analytics of your site always make sure your users are spending time on the right pages . For instance if a user is spending too much time on a page with little content or not much to see it could mean you have a problem, whether it be trouble navigating the site or the content is just hard to understand.

Sharing is Caring

Another great way to gauge how well you are doing on social media is by how often your content is being shared, comment, reposted or in the context of Twitter, “retweeted”. Like mentioned in an earlier post, Keys To Social Media Marketing: “Quality over Quantity” fewer loyal yet active followers are more important than a large group of anonymous users who visited the page once and never returned.

Where did you go?

Keeping track of your followers is important. You not only want to know when you are gaining followers, but also when you lose them. It is important to understand why that customer might have left, be it something on the site or a competitor with a better pitch or product. Keep track of how often users are entering your site, what they downloading, purchasing or even just signing up. Keep track of user activity.

Exit Only

Be mindful of where all users who have visited more than two pages on your site make their exit. If any one page is responsible for 5% or more of your total exits that page may need editing or may need to be removed. Don’t lose the users attention they are the lifeline of your business.

Twitter is a vehicle that is more about showing your followers that their is a person behind the computer. Yes you want to get your message across and share links that will hopefully get retweeted and clicked on, but you want to do it in your own voice. You want the user to really feel connected to you even tho they might not know you, unlike Facebook which is a more intimate setting where most people know each other already. Doing that will enhance the odds of followers clicking on your link. Read more →

Facebook is the most intimate of all social media sites. It is a place where people go to keep in touch with friends, chat and just stay up to date with the people who matter or interest them. It is a place where people go to unwind and relax so make sure to keep your tone friendly and light as you do not want to come off as pushy. Read more →

Social media marketing is the ability to incorporate the various social media websites to your advantage as a marketing communication tool. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkIn, YouTube and other sites all of which we will go more in depth on weekly series which will feature the different social media site and the correct ways to use it. The primary uses of social media for marketing purposes is to share content, videos and images all for marketing purposes. It is a great way to connect with your audience, be it connecting with your current customer to see what improvements or new ideas they would like or to gather new customers to grow your audience.Read more →

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